Revving up the innovation engine

This past weekend, we celebrated Yahoo!'s 18th birthday. A birthday is a good time to reflect on the experiences that have helped shape you. This one is no different.

That's why our birthday was the perfect time to bring together Yahoos from around the world for our quarterly Hackday. We created our first Hackday in 2005, bringing some of our most eager minds together in an all-night coding session. I'm proud that this tradition has continued.

Hackdays are special for Yahoos -- as much a part of our history as our birthday itself. Hackers from all over the world come together for 24 hours to create something truly special. The experience is memorable, not only for the eccentricities, but also for the inspiring hacks that Yahoos create. Some hacks have become full-fledged products, like Yahoo! Weather for Android.

{Hackers in Yahoo! Bangalore}

For our 18th birthday, we decided to turn our Hackday up a notch. We challenged hackers to focus on making our core products more inspiring, entertaining and innovative.

We were blown away by the number of Yahoos, diversity of hacks and creative energy. And, in fact, we broke a hack-to-product record by integrating the winning hack into our existing products within just a few days of its victory. This winning hack intelligently helps users find a web page when they have an incomplete URL for that page. Y! Canada News and Y! Sports blog are already live with this new feature.

We also broke another record -- it was our biggest Hackday in the history of Yahoo!. Yahoos participated from nine offices across six time zones, all the way from Sunnyvale to Singapore, and from Norway to India.

We're excited to turn our hacks into products, so stay tuned to see what's in the pipeline.